Research

This paper examines the extent to which social pressures can foster greater responsiveness among public officials. I conduct a non-deceptive field experiment on 1400 city executives across all 50 states and measure their level of responsiveness to open records requests. I use two messages to prime social pressure. The first treatment centers on the norm and duty to be responsive to the public’s request for transparency. The second treatment is grounded in the peer effect literature, which suggests that individuals change their behavior in the face of potential social sanctioning and accountability. I find no evidence that mayors are affected by priming the officials’ duty to the public. The mayors who received the peer effects prime were 6–8 percentage points less likely to respond, which suggests a “backfire effect.” This paper contributes to the growing responsiveness literature on the local level and the potential detrimental impact of priming peer effects.

Link to paper here.

Urban–rural differences in partisan political loyalty are as familiar in the United States as they are in other countries. In this paper, we examine Gallup survey data from the early-2000s through 2018 to understand the urban–rural fissure that has been so noticeable in recent elections. We consider the potential mechanisms of an urban–rural political divide. We suggest that urban and rural dwellers oppose each other because they reside in far apart locations without much interaction and support different political parties because population size structures opinion quite differently in small towns compared with large cities. In particular, we consider the extent to which the compositional characteristics (i.e., race, income, education, etc.) of the individuals living in these locales drives the divide. We find that sizable urban–rural differences persist even after accounting for an array of individual-level characteristics that typically distinguish them.

Link to the paper here.

Link to Oxford Bibliographies here.

Link here.

Given a patchwork system of overlapping local institutions, can residents direct public policy? Current approaches to representation at the local level may present a distorted view of how democracy operates because they fail to account for the overlapping nature of institutions. To address this gap, I first implement a framework that incorporates multiple overlapping governing institutions: cities, counties, school districts, and special districts. Second, I use data from more than 500,000 survey responses to estimate a novel measure of local ideological preferences for cities over time. Finally, to assess the impact of ideology on public policy outcomes, I use a Bayesian within-between random effects model. This methodology yields three major findings. First, I demonstrate that cross-sectional responsiveness exists. Second, I find evidence for dynamic responsiveness in spending but inconclusive evidence for taxation. Third, I provide descriptive evidence that consolidated governance fosters greater responsiveness. I reframe the responsiveness discussion from a single governing unit to a holistic system of overlapping institutions and provide the strongest evidence to date that local governments respond dynamically to the ideology of citizens.

Link to Draft as of 9/24/23

Link to PolMeth 2021 Poster

Where and why are discriminatory ordinances adopted? Theories of racial threat suppose that members of a racial majority group regard the presence of minorities as a threat to their socio-political status and implement policies to hurt that minority population. I use the racial threat hypothesis to examine the adoption of criminal activity nuisance ordinances (or crime-free housing laws). These ordinances allow officials to designate specific properties and residents as nuisances after repeated police interactions. After that designation, property owners are penalized with fines or the seizure of property if they do not respond by removing the residents. Using data from Ohio municipalities, I find that the racial composition of cities predicts the emergence of criminal activity nuisance ordinances. I attempt to rule out alternative hypotheses surrounding the proportion of renter-occupied housing, crime, and poverty. In further exploring the results, I use a machine learning technique called Random Forests to uncover the discontinuity or “tipping point” where the propensity for adopting such a policy sharply increases or decreases. This research speaks to the generalizability of the racial threat hypothesis, the importance of representation, and the nation's diversification.

Link to PolMeth 2022 Poster
Link to Paper as of 9/4/23

Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts---including the candidate's name, personal characteristics, profession, and interest group endorsements---to decide whom to support. But it is unclear which of these factors voters are most likely to consider important. In this paper, we present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment, estimating the marginal effect of various candidate attributes on vote share. We survey a nationally-representative sample of American voters, investigating attributes that are likely to be salient and available in local-level political contests, including gender, race, age, homeownership, profession, and interest group endorsements. We explore how these estimated effects differ by the demographic and geographic characteristics of our respondents.

Working Paper

Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDD) are widely popular in the social sciences as they have been shown to recover local average treatment effects under a few assumptions. However, concerns about visualizing raw data and accounting for natural variation in the data have led to skepticism of their results. We propose using Change Point Analysis (CPA) as a tool within the RDD framework to increase the credibility of RDD findings. Using this method, researchers may efficiently identify and evaluate discontinuities in the raw data without the need for pre-specification. The ability of CPA to correctly identify the theory-driven discontinuity should lend credibility to the design, while finding other discontinuities may signal noisy data or other threats to identification. We demonstrate the robustness of CPA in detecting meaningful breakpoints through simulations and replications. CPA assists in visualizing data and validating changes against theoretical expectations. We leave practitioners with a sequential workflow to aid their research using RDDs.

Poster: Asian and MENA Polmeth

Note: The paper is in development, but if you have comments and suggestions please send them to bryant.moy@nyu.edu. Thanks!

We are currently developing a nonparametric Bayesian approach — Gaussian Process Regressions — to estimate small-area public opinion from large nationally representative surveys.

Does self-placement ideology map onto local issues of taxation and spending? This paper investigates the applicability of self-placement ideology in local politics research. While older scholars of urban politics have argued that non-ideological factors drive local politics, the recent literature recognizes the influence of mass/aggregate ideology on local government policies. Yet, this connection between ideology and local governance remains unclear because prior research may conflate local-level preferences (national views disaggregated to the local level) and local government preferences (attitudes about cities, counties, and school districts). Using a novel survey of Americans, we demonstrate that self-placement ideology adequately captures individual attitudes on local taxation and spending at various levels of government (city, county, school district, and federal). The self-placement ideological scale effectively reflects residents' general preferences on taxation and spending, applicable across local government levels. This study offers insights for researchers in local politics and encourages further exploration at the intersection of ideology and local politics.

The mayoral email archive is a novel dataset that includes non-private emails archived from the inboxes and sent boxes of mayors between January 1, 2018, and March 31, 2018. I collected these emails via a series of open records requests sent out in the summer of 2018. The open records requests were initially a part of a project on social pressure and mayoral responsiveness that was published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science in 2021.

I am currently downloading, parsing, and cleaning the email records. After the cleaning process is complete, I will incorporate the emails into my research agenda on local governance.

Opposition to new housing development is widely held. Previous work finds that Not-in-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) attitudes are largely driven by fear of neighborhood change and anti-developer sentiment. Both of these sentiments are powerful -- in some sense -- because they rely on negativity bias or a strong reaction to negative information. Arguments in favor of housing development tend to focus on the positive aspects, such as lower rents, racial integration, and opportunity expansion. This study investigates whether altering the narrative to highlight the economic gains landlords receive as a consequence of restricted housing -- landlord profits -- can increase public support for housing developments. We propose a survey experiment to answer this question. Our findings will underscore the potential for nuanced framing strategies to foster greater acceptance of housing development projects, thereby aiding in addressing the housing affordability crisis through informed policy-making.

Discriminatory police practices have prompted calls to defund the police. While the definition of `defund' encompasses various proposals, the diversion of police funding or the failure to hire officers has broad consequences. Indeed, recent work by economists find that increasing police force size saves Black lives by reducing homicides. However, increases in police on the streets also increases the enforcement and arrests for low-level quality-of-life offenses, which disproportionately fall on Black Americans and triggers perceptions of undue surveillance and targeting. This under-over-policing phenomenon may explain the lack of public support for defunding proposals, even among Black Americans. This paper employs an experimental survey design to investigate how information regarding the consequences of policing (reduction in homicide rates and increase in low-level quality-of-life arrests) influences the public's perception and willingness to support more police on the streets. We expect Blacks and Whites to process these tradeoffs differently. This project speaks to the broad challenges of policing in unequal multiracial democracies and the potential policy tradeoffs cities must consider when funding the police.